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THE MILITARY EDUCATION OF 
GRANT AS GENERAL 



BY 
COLONEL ARTHUR L. CONGER 




Reprinted from the Wisconsin Magazine of History 
Volume IV, Number 3, March, 1921 



F" (o-r?. 



LIBRAKY Or ONGHESS 
RECeiVED 

I ,,...; 1 4 1923 

I DOCUMENTS DiVrSIOiN 



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GENERAL GRANT 

From ;i ]ihot<)pra])h presented to the Wisconsin Historical Society by Mr. J. H. 
Evans of I'latteville. Mr. Evans, who knew Grant during his Galena period, was 
in Memphis in November, 1862, where he chanced to see the General come out of 
a photographer's shop. Entering, he engaged a copy of this picture which had 
just been taken. 



THE MILITARY EDUCATION OF GRANT 

AS GENERAL 

Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

In a conversation a few weeks ago an officer of high rank 
in our army, who had himself exercised a higher command 
during the late war, said to me: 'T become more and more 
curious to learn the habits and nature of the military geni- 
uses of the past. I suppose they were geniuses — but we did 
not have any such in the late war. In that the leaders were 
all mediocre people who knew very little and who owed their 
positions to other qualities." 

Many years ago this same baffling lustre of fable, shad- 
owing the lives and deeds of past military heroes and mak- 
ing of them creatures of a different sort from the men of our 
own time, led me on a quest into the secrets of their genius. 
And, if I now choose Grant as a typical case for critical 
investigation it is not from any desire to evade the questions 
connected with the leaders in later wars or to divert atten- 
tion back into the now neglected realm of our former mili- 
tary history, but because Grant is one of the most recent 
examples of a military leader concerning whom we have 
access to the sources requisite, and yet far enough removed 
to permit their dispassionate examination. 

The spirit of this inquiry is not one of captiousness. The 
subject is approached with a sincere admiration for the 
character and ability of the man who, through his own 
efforts and profiting by his opportunities, developed a ca- 
pacity beyond that of any other general of his time or of his 
nation. Others may have possessed greater talents; no 
other has proved them by his actual conduct in command of 
great armies in a war of magnitude. 

Before taking up Grant's career, permit me a preliminary 
plowing of the ground by way of a few military truisms: 
First, Generalship, in its military sense, is the art of leading 
masses of men in campaigns or battles ; it excludes the roles 



4 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

and functions of a troop, battery, company, or regimental 
commander and begins with those of a brigade, division, or 
higher unit commander. 

Second, The problems confronting a general increase in 
difficulty and in their demands on his powers and knowl- 
edge in proportion to the size of his command. They be- 
come very involved and complex when his command passes 
beyond the 60,000 (or modern army corps) stage and be- 
come supremely difficult when his command passes the 
200,000 (or modern army) stage, so that it has to operate as 
separate armies or army groups. 

Third, The burdens upon the shoulders of an indepen- 
dent commander are vastly greater than the burdens upon 
those of a subordinate commander regardless of the size of 
the command. Thus it is harder to command a brigade 
acting independently than a division acting as part of an 
army corps, or to command a division acting independently 
than a corps acting as part of an army. 

Fourth, Contrary to the popular conception, victory or 
defeat is not a sound criterion of good generalship. Both 
the opposing commanders may be good generals, or both 
may be poor generals ; yet, if the armies fight, one must win 
and the other lose. Though the leader of one army may be 
superior to his opponent in generalship, yet the condition 
of the troops as to discipline or morale, the proportionate 
number of combatants, or amount of material on each side, 
or other factors, such as terrain, supplies, transportation, or 
even the weather, may still determine the issue of the combat 
or campaign. 

Hence, in judging the generalship displayed in any given 
case, we cannot conclude, as in a prize fight, that the best 
man won, but must review the general's decisions and acts 
in the light of the situation as it presented itself to him. We 
may blame him for failing to take the measures necessary to 
inform himself about the actual situation, but so far as his 



The Military Education of Grant as General 5 

actions and orders are concerned, we must view them in the 
actual setting of the moment. Was the order given clear, 
definite, and forceful— suited, not to us with our fuller 
knowledge, but to the man or men to whom issued? Nor 
are the results obtained to be left out of consideration. 
Were the results obtained worth the cost — that is the was- 
tage in men and their morale, the expenditure or loss of ma- 
terial, the gain or loss of prestige or territory? 

On the purely personal side we cannot as judge or jury 
condemn any American general prior to this late war for 
accepting a military command without possessing the 
knowledge requisite to ensure a reasonable hope of success 
to his government or warrant the expectation in his officers 
and men that, if their lives were spent, they would be spent 
at least in a justifiable or rational effort for the common 
cause. For, until after the Spanish War, we never had in this 
country any school where the principles of troop leadership 
of any force larger than a regiment were either studied or 
taught; nor did our army afford any opportunity for the 
exercise of such leadership. Between wars we had never 
had organized, except on paper, a general officer's command. 
The consequences were that no one knew that any special 
knowledge was required to exercise effective command of a 
brigade or higher unit and — as the inevitable corollary to 
this ignorance — that each citizen secretly believed in his 
heart that he was the one man divinely inspired by Provi- 
dence to lead his fellow citizens in battle. 

Let us turn now to Grant's first exercise of a general's 
command in battle, at Belmont. The nature of the affair 
is well known. Grant was ordered to create a diversion. 
To do so he embarked two brigades comprising five regi- 
ments of infantry, two troops of cavalry, and a battery 
(in all 3,000 men) on transports at Cairo and sailed under 
naval convoy down the Mississippi, landing on the morning 
of November 7, 1861 a few miles north of Belmont, marched 



6 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

overland, attacked and captured a Confederate post de- 
fended by 2,000 men, but did not capture the men. His 
command became demoralized, pillaging the captured camp. 
Reinforcing Confederate troops crossed the river from Co- 
lumbus and, by maneuvering to cut off their retreat, drove 
Grant's men in confusion back to their transports. One 
regiment was indeed cut off, but by the wit of its colonel and 
good luck it managed ultimately to get back to the trans- 
ports. 

Let us examine Grant's role in this affair. 

His first act upon landing was to detail a battalion to 
remain as reserve. Was this correct? Assuming that 
Grant knew the ground, a battalion (200 to 600 men) should 
not have been left back "as reserve." It was justifiable to 
leave a small transport guard. 

He then marched toward Belmont to a crossroad where 
the two brigades were deployed side by side in single line. 

Were the time, place, and method of deployment justi- 
fied? 

As to the time, we have no information on which to judge. 
As to place, two of the regiments were deployed directly be- 
hind a pond which apparently could not be crossed. Thus, 
when orders were given to attack, the right regiment went 
ahead, but the next two regiments had to reform column 
and march around the pond; they then took up a false di- 
rection of attack, crossing the line of the two left regiments 
which had meantime also lost their direction and gone to the 
extreme right in an attempt to close in on the right regiment. 
Hence the place of deployment cannot be justified, at least 
as a place for the deployment of the whole force. 

As to the method of deployment we know that two com- 
panies of each regiment were sent forward as skirmishers. 
The remainder of the regiments were deployed in a single 
continuous line without battalion supports, or without bri- 
gade reserves, or without a general reserve, since the battal- 



The Military Education of Grant as General 7 

ion left at the transports two miles away could not prop- 
erly be so des'gnated. 

Such a formation for an attack in woods involved inevit- 
ably everything that followed. The first attack might win 
or lose; if it lost, the whole command would become demor- 
alized; if it won, it would become disorganized, and the 
least reserve held out by the enemy would suffice to defeat 
it. As to what followed, the Confederate commander, 
Pillow, did not hold out a reserve and was in the same situa- 
tion as Grant until reinforcements sent by Polk across the 
river turned the t de. 

Under the circumstances was Grant's order to attack 
justified? Grant knew the enemy's strength; he knew the 
opposing commander. The attack formation was of course 
the best he knew, and he trusted perhaps n the justice of 
the Union cause for success. As he saw the situation it was 
correct, and today it must be considered correct. That 
order to attack was Grant's last act as commander that day. 
Not having any reserve he had no further influence on the 
course of events, for his so-called reserve at the transports 
broke and ran with the rest. It was a case of sauve qui pent. 
What did Grant not suffer and learn through the long 
hours of that day! Brigade Commander on the line — yet 
unable to influence it; having no reserve; seeing his troops 
turn first into a mob of looters, then into a rabble of fugitives, 
without cohesion or power of united action; thinking of that 
lost regiment which he knew to be cut off! Though the 
regiment finally worked its way through the woods and 
reached the transports, how must Grant have dreaded in the 
meantime having to return to Cairo to report defeat and the 
loss of that Twenty-seventh Regiment of Illinois Infantry! 
I can sympathize with him in that as I had a brigade myself 
in the Argonne with a lost battalion. I hasten to add that I 
did not lose it, it having been lost before I was given com- 
mand of the brigade; but I know how Grant must have felt. 



8 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

So much for his first fight in command. We can give 
him all possible credit for being willing to fight and for sens- 
ing the enemy's weakness; but on the side of professional 
knowledge of how to fight we must give him zero. Had he 
done in France what he did at Belmont, and been found out, 
he would have been sent to Blois and demoted or discharged ; 
had he made that deployment and advance against a trained 
general on the other side, assuming the troops as they were, 
he and his command would have been killed or captured. 
The affair approximated Moltke's description of our Civil 
War, "Two armed mobs chasing each other around the 
country, from which nothing could be learned." Moltke 
was wrong in this last; Grant did learn from it. Further, 
if it was Grant's first lesson in bitterness under military 
responsibility, it was by no means his first lesson in human 
bitterness. 

Grant had not wanted to go to West Point, had in that 
primitive institution remained as one apart — in it but not 
of it. In the Mexican War he had seen an army torn by 
intrigues and jealousies, bungling through by sheer weight 
of superiority of race, in spite of total lack by the officers of 
scientific knowledge of war. After that war he had shared 
in the debasement of the army, turning, in ignorance of any 
professional knowledge or study, to gambling, hunting, 
and intoxication for amusement. Finally, hounded out 
of the army, a failure as an officer, he proved likewise a 
failure as a farmer and barely able to make a living as a 
helper in a store. 

After these intellectually as well as financially lean years 
in civil life, what must not have been the bitterness in 
Grant's soul, as he saw his fellow graduates from West Point 
commissioned as generals to bear high responsibilities in the 
day of their country's need, while he, an outcast, met no 
response to his tender of his services as an officer, awaited in 
vain in McClellan's anteroom an opportunity to seek a 



The Military Education of Grant as General 9 

humble staff appointment, and finally was able only through 
his knowledge of army routine to gain employment as a 
clerk to make out muster rolls? Grant did not scorn this 
humble duty; he performed it like a man and, having per- 
formed it, was given his reward by being made colonel of a 
regiment so insubordinate and even mutinous that no one 
else dared command it. 

But these humiliations had done for Grant something 
that life had not done for many other generals in the Civil 
or any other war; they had made him look reality squarely 
in the face. If Grant approached the problem of leadership 
in war much less tutored in the professional part than a sav- 
age chieftain, at least he knew himself and his own capacity 
unflinchingly to take punishment. He might make mis- 
takes, but he would not conceal from himself the fact that he 
had made them, nor would he be so overcome by emotion 
that he could not learn from these mistakes how to avoid re- 
peating them. 

It was two months after Belmont before Grant again 
showed the will to fight. Early in January he began to ask 
Halleck, the Department Commander, to let him attack 
Fort Henry. In February, three months after Belmont, 
Halleck let him go. How had Grant spent the intervening 
time? 

What he should have done was to equip his troops, or- 
ganize his troops, organize a staff, train his command, par- 
ticularly his higher officers. There is no evidence as to 
what he tried to do. The probability is that Grant, not 
having any competent staff, or not knowing how to use one, 
let his time be eaten up by details of administration. Cer- 
tain it is that his troops were relatively no better prepared 
for Henry than they had been for Belmont. They were 
more highly organized on paper, but it was, so to speak, a 
deathbed organization, made at the last moment before 
going in, and, in the modern sense of the term, no organiza- 



10 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

tion. Grant had not yet developed a staff; and if he made 
any attempt to train his officers they failed to show it. The 
elements in Grant's favor were that the troops showed evi- 
dences of little better discipline and drill, and Grant himself 
now knew a few things to be avoided so far as concerned his 
own orders and action; that his troops had had a taste of 
gunpowder which their new opponents had not; and that 
Grant now had under his command C. F. Smith, one of the 
best, if not the best, of the officers in the Union army at that 
time. 

The landing for the attack on Forts Henry and Heiman 
was made about six miles above the forts on the Tennessee 
River. The command was to march at dawn on February 
6 : one stronger column (three brigades under McClernand) 
to attack the land side of Fort Henry; one weaker column 
(two brigades under C. F. Smith) to attack Fort Heiman; 
while the gunboat fleet under Commodore Foote brought 
the forts under gun fire. Note that General Grant now has 
a reserve of one brigade which is to follow between the two 
columns along the river bank. 

Here we see Grant digesting but not yet assimilating his 
experience. He had a reserve this time and he stayed with 
it. The result is pathetic. There was no road along the 
river and the reserve could not go anywhere. McClernand 
got out on his road and, not having any will to fight, was 
seized with panic, halted, and did nothing. About noon the 
navy brought Fort Henry under fire and the raw Confed- 
erate troops were terror-stricken by the mere sound of the 
shells, all but a few of which went harmlessly overhead. 
The infantry garrison ran away, and the artillerists and the 
general commanding the river fort surrendered to the gun- 
boats. An hour or two later McClernand, resuming the 
march with his column, reached the fort, and some hours 
later Grant, learning the news, came up to find his plans for 
capturing the garrison gone awry. Smith arrived toward 
evening at the abandoned Fort Heiman. 



The Military Education of Grant as General 11 

Can we approve Grant's march order? 

Clearly he had drawn too broad a deduction from his 
Belmont experience. There he wished he had had a reserve 
and wished he had stayed with it; here he had had one and 
had stayed with it but had not needed the reserves and found 
himself during the critical hours absent from the scene of 
action, powerless to influence events. Even after the sur- 
render of the fort and the arrival of McClernand things had 
gone on all wrong according to Grant's opinion. 

No wonder that, having his hoped-for battle fizzle out 
under his eyes, he yearned to attack Fort Donelson. Was 
nothing ever to go right? 

Five days later he began the march from the Tennessee 
Valley across to the Cumberland Valley to attack Fort Don- 
elson. Note the assimilation of experience here. He 
organizes a right column, a left column, and a reserve; but 
the reserve does not attempt to follow across country; 
it follows by the best road, and Grant himself rides where 
he belongs, at the head of the main body of the right or main 
column . 

That decision may seem simple to the reader, but, after 
plunging into the fog of the Civil War as I have, and dis- 
covering McClelland and Burnside and nearly all the rest 
doing the same wrong things time and again and never re- 
flecting, never seeing that they were wrong, and then com- 
ing upon Grant learning these simple lessons that we today 
learn at our school of the line and staff college, learning them 
one at a time and haltingly, but learning them, the contrast 
between the man capable of learning and the incapables is so 
vivid that one does not wonder that the man who learned 
also rose to command all the armies of the United States. 

But more lessons were to come to Grant at Donelson. 
Arriving before the Fort on the afternoon of February 12, 
Grant is seen applying what he thought were the lessons of 
Fort Henry, trying to extend his line to the right to cut off 



12 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

the escape of the garrison. Smith, now a division com- 
mander, has put in his command in scientific formation, 
that is distributed in depth, skirmishers, firing fine, supports, 
brigade reserves, and a whole brigade as divisional reserve. 
McClernand, on the right, has his command, also a division 
of three brigades, strung out in one single line, not a single 
reserve back of it! Does Grant commend Smith and 
chide McClernand? Not at all. He urges on McClernand 
to extend still more and keeps pushing him out to the 
right in an effort to extend the line to the river above 
Fort Donelson. Not appreciating correctly the difference 
between the Fort Henry and the Fort Donelson situations, 
he even takes the reserve brigade which General C. F. Smith 
had so carefully treasured up and uses it with other fresh 
troops, brought up the Cumberland River by transport, to 
create a third division under Wallace which is used further 
to attenuate the line, now backed only by the scanty re- 
serves Smith has been able to save from Grant's lavish dis- 
persion — now characterized in our schools as the favorite 
tactical sin of the beginner. 

Grant evidently expected to repeat the naval history of 
Fort Henry with the difference that this time the army 
would have arrived to receive the surrender by the time the 
gunboats had shelled the fort into submission. Had the 
navy been a school-trained, and not an experienced-trained 
navy, with not much experience at that. Grant's expecta- 
tions in this regard might still have been fulfilled. But the 
navy stuck to its "closing-in" tactics so successful at Henry, 
but fatally inapplicable here. 

Tactics is very simple; but one has to know which rule 
to apply. Henry was a water battery; Donelson was a hill 
battery with nearly all short-range guns. At Donelson the 
gunboats with their weapons of superior range and effective- 
ness had only to stand oft' and destroy the fort batteries at 
their leisure and then ascend the river and rake the garrison 



The Military Education of Grant as General 13 

fore and aft until it surrendered. Instead, the fleet steamed 
in to short range from where it could not reach the hill bat- 
tery with its guns, but where the short-range guns of the fort 
could fire on the fleet so effectively as to compel it to drop 
out of action. 

This happened on the fourteenth. Grant, seemingly, 
was taken aback. The Fort Donelson forces, strongly re- 
inforced and jubilant over their victory over the gunboats, 
thought only of attacking and of destroying Grant's land 
forces. Thus while Grant, unconscious of the unsoundness 
of his dispositions, without even the forethought to place 
Smith, his next ranking officer, in temporary command, 
went down the river and aboard the flagship to arrange 
further naval co-operation, the Confederate forces were 
forming for attack with high hopes of success. 

The Confederate plan of General Pillow was similar to 
that of Lee later in the same year at Mechanicsville and 
Gaines's Mill. Both attacks were to take advantage of an 
over-extended Union right flank and the absence of Union 
reserves back of it. Both Pillow's and Lee's attacks were 
bungled in about the same way and both, in spite of the 
bungling, were reasonably successful. The difference was 
that after Grant's command, or half of it, had been de- 
stroyed. Grant, returning to the battlefield, was met by Smith, 
who begged permission to counter attack with his still 
treasured portion of reserves. Grant consented; he could 
hardly refuse his former revered instructor at West Point! 

Curiously enough, the same counter measure to Lee's 
attack was suggested to McClellan. Had he accepted the 
offer of his corps commander who wished to attack Rich- 
mond he might have gone through and brought a speedy end 
to the war in 1862. However, there was at that time no 
C. F. Smith in the Army of the Potomac who knew enough 
to treasure up reserves and be prepared for all eventualities, 
and therefore McClellan and his Army of the Potomac went 
down the James River in shame and defeat. 



14 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

After the surrender of Fort Donelson, Grant was as one 
stunned. The new situation was one outside his experience. 
He proposed tentatively to Halleck an advance on Nash- 
ville. He does not appear to have seen the rich fruits of 
victory open to his grasp as he had seen the opportunity for 
attacking Fort Donelson after the fall of Fort Henry. 

Possibly the Civil War schoolmaster, experience, stepped 
in to save embarrassment at this critical juncture and to 
keep Grant from growing conceited over the success, to 
which he was so little accustomed, of his partly earned 
Donelson victory, and at the same time, which was most 
important, afford him leisure for reflection on his mistakes 
and their consequences. At any rate friction with Halleck, 
since explained away as owing to the suppression of messages 
by a traitorous telegrapher, resulted in Grant's being re- 
lieved from command and placed in virtual arrest for over 
a week. Meanwhile Halleck ordered his command sent up 
the Tennessee, which movement was executed under the 
orders of C. F. Smith. Unhappily for Grant and for the 
Union, Smith, wounded at Donelson, soon after had to be 
relieved from duty and shortly afterwards died. Grant, 
restored to duty, found his army encamped at Pittsburg 
Landing near Shiloh without outposts, without reconnois- 
sance, without secret service, without camps laid out on any 
systematic plan, without instruction of officers, without 
camp maps, good roads, or guideposts. 

Grant failed to perceive the lack of these requisites. 
Indeed, he seems at Shiloh to have struck the low water 
mark of his military education. He has been blamed for 
failure to intrench, but the criticism does not come from any 
competent source. He is not properly chargeable with 
shunning preparations for a defensive fight; he is chargeable 
with neglecting to prepare his officers and men for any kind 
of battle at all, like the improvident father who brings up 
his son only to spend money and then suddenly goes under 
in a panic, leaving the son stranded and helpless. 



The Military Education of Grant as General 15 

Grant was undoubtedly disgruntled over his unjust 
treatment by Halleck; but the main factor was, I believe, 
that he was still dazed by the Donelson crisis. The civihan 
does not realize the strain of command in action nor the 
time necessary to recover from its effects. Grant had had 
three months between Belmont and Henry -Donelson ; his 
teacher, experience, gave him only fifty days between Don- 
elson and Shiloh, and, even with the enforced inaction of 
ten days, this was not enough. 

Grant was caught mentally as unprepared for the battle 
as was his command. He and his army were saved by the 
mistakes of the visionary and inexperienced Confederate 
general, A. S. Johnston, and by the firm adherence by Grant 
to the same policy Smith had taught him under the stress 
at Donelson: to prepare a reserve for counterattack. Grant 
had no C. F. Smith at Shiloh to pave an easy way for a 
counterattack; but a reserve was gradually and finally 
built up, and it brought eventual success. 

We have already said— and this is as true today as in 
Grant's time— that tactical success is assured by adherence 
to very simple principles. The difficulty exists only in 
knowing when and how to apply them. Thus, for example, 
nearly every decisive victory has been gained by the right 
use of reserves withheld from action until the arrival of the 
timely moment. Nearly every great general has been 
taught this lesson by bitter experience: Napoleon learned 
it at Marengo ; Moltke at Koeniggratz. In both cases their 
reserves came on the field at the critical moment by accident. 
Napoleon ever after planned his battles to occur like the 
"accident" at Marengo; Moltke did the same. Lee should 
have learned this lesson at Frazier's Farm. Jackson learned 
it early and while he lived applied it, for Lee, with excellent 
results. Lee himself did not master it until his bitter failure 
at Gettysburg brought home to him the most precious secret 
of the military commander, too late except for use in parry- 



16 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

ing Grant's blows of 1864. Sherman never learned this 
great lesson of tactics, although he mastered many others. 
Sheridan was taught it at Winchester; Thomas learned it at 
Chickamauga and practiced it with a wonderfully sure hand 
at Nashville. I do not know where Joffre learned it, but he 
used it with skill in the First Battle of the Marne as did Pe- 
tain in the Second Battle of the Marne. 

This lesson which had escaped McDowell, Buell, Mc- 
Clellan, Burnside and every other Union leader was worth 
to the Union all the time and losses at Belmont, Donelson, 
and Shiloh which it had cost to teach it to Grant. In the 
absence of any school of applied theory in that epoch it 
could only be taught by favoring experience and then only 
to the apt pupil. 

Shiloh, perhaps Grant's most vital personal experience, 
was followed by another two months' period of gestation 
during which Halleck joined in person the Army of the Ten- 
nessee and assigned Grant as second in command with no 
duties save to observe and to reflect. 

Thereafter Grant, again in command, had various minor 
experiences which time does not permit our following out, 
but which served more fully to equip him for the problems 
of the Vicksburg campaign the following year. In that 
campaign Grant displayed the same knowledge and skill 
and displayed it in much the same manner as had Napoleon 
in his Ulm campaign in 1805. The only difl^erence was that 
what Napoleon had learned partly at school and partly 
through his experience in Italy Grant had learned almost 
wholly from his experience in the Mississippi, Tennessee, 
and Cumberland valleys. Never did experience teach more 
patiently and persistently, harshly at times, yet always with 
ample periods for recovery of balance and inward absorp- 
tion. Always in independent command, first with 3,000 
men (Belmont), then 9,000 (Henry), then 18,000 (Donel- 
son), next 36,000 (Shiloh), lastly 72,000 (Vicksburg), 



The Military Education of Grant as General 17 

making all the beginner's mistakes but profiting by each and 
fortunately not having his career wrecked by them, who else 
is there in all history who has been given such a military 
education? 

One marked feature of Grant's military education was 
its leisurely progress. Following the surrender of Vicks- 
burg he again had a period of inaction of three months' dura- 
tion. Just what use Grant made of these periods of inactiv- 
ity there is no evidence to show. He did not, apparently, 
as Napoleon used to do between campaigns, have maps pre- 
pared of the battlefields and study the past operations with 
a view to extracting the utmost to be derived from a thor- 
ough knowledge of the complete facts. Yet his own conduct 
showed that he did learn from them; and I cannot escape 
the conviction that these periods of protracted inaction and 
reflection were as essential to his mastering of the military 
art as were the intermittent periods of activity. 

It is well, however, to point out to such as may have 
military ambitions that never again under modern condi- 
tions of warfare are we likely to have a conflict drag on 
through intermittent fighting, awaiting the education in ac- 
tion of the general to end it. The general-in-chief in an- 
other great war may not begin his education at a staff college 
but it is certain that he will begin it at his desk and following 
staff college methods, and not, as Grant began it, by com- 
manding in a muddled fight like Belmont. 

In July, 1863, Grant was merely one of three successful 
Union generals, Meade and Rosecrans being the other two. 
Meade during the autumn proved a disappointment while 
Rosecrans, defeated at Chickamauga, was a still greater one. 
It was thus only natural that in October Grant should be 
called to Tennessee to raise the resultant siege of Chatta- 
nooga. Here he met his first problem in command of com- 
bined armies, for the Army of the Cumberland was to be 
reinforced by the Army of the Tennessee, brought from 



18 Col 071 el Arthur L. Conger 

Vicksburg under Sherman, and by Hooker's Corps borrowed 
from the Army of the Potomac. 

Grant's orders for the attack on Bragg's army on Mis- 
sionary Ridge showed the same rawness in the new and more 
complex game of commanding armies that his orders for 
Belmont had shown in the handling of a brigade. Grant 
ignored three important considerations : First, he overlooked 
the need of giving each of his armies an appropriate mission 
in the approaching battle. His own former Army of the 
Tennessee, now under Sherman, was to make the attack 
while the Army of the Cumberland under Thomas was to 
look on. Second, he antagonized Thomas' men and 
Hooker's men by appearing to conduct the operations so as 
to reflect credit on his own former army and consequently 
to discredit further the Cumberland Army still stinging from 
its defeat at Chickamauga and disgruntled over its half- 
rations during the siege of Chattanooga. Third, Grant, 
finding Bragg's front formidable in appearance, adopted a 
flank attack without any reconnoissance to determine 
whether the terrain was feasible for such an attack, which it 
proved not to be. Yet he had been in Chattanooga over a 
month before the battle. 

A spirit of emulation between rival units, whether divi- 
sions, corps, or armies, serving side by side is an admirable 
thing; yet seldom can the higher commander afford to take 
sides in such rivalries. That Grant's inexperience led him 
to appear to do so might easily have compromised the 
hoped-for victory; that it did not do so in this instance was 
owing to Grant's having assigned Sherman an impossible 
task and, through lack of broader tactical experience, hav- 
ing assigned to Thomas an easy assaulting position though 
with orders to demonstrate only and not to attack. The 
men themselves, stung by the insult to their army and their 
commander, won a soldiers' victory by refusing to halt and 
going on to the capture of Missionary Ridge. 



The Military Education of Grant as General 19 

Pope, in 1862, was ruined by a similar display of partisan- 
ship. Grant, more fortunate in 1863, was saved from the 
consequences of his own faulty conception, plan, and orders 
by the fact that his errors in the psychological estimate of 
his own army and his faulty estimate of the terrain neutral- 
ized each other. 

This victory brought Grant, after another three months' 
period for digestion and assimilation of his experience, to 
Washington and to the assignment to command all the 
armies of the United States. This put him to the supreme 
test of a military commander of his time and gave him the 
new role of planning and ordering campaigns rather than 
battles. 

Circumstances combined to render this role easy for him. 
His loyal and trusted friend, Sherman, in command of all 
the troops in the western theater of war, required, as Grant 
saw it, only to be told what to do and when to do it, not how 
to do it. This confidence in Sherman saved him the error 
of attempting to prescribe details for the campaigns at a 
distance from himself, an error which Napoleon fell into and 
which was one of the main factors of his ultimate ruin. 
Armies of a half million men are not to be commanded that 
way with good results. Grant had a further advantage in 
writing a directive for Sherman, in that he was personally 
acquainted with all important parts of the western theater 
from the mouth of the Mississippi to the Alleghanies, had 
had Sherman with him most of the time, and knew Sher- 
man's ideas and what he could do. 

As regards the plan of campaign for the more important 
eastern army. Grant had the advantage of being able to 
appreciate and to be guided by President Lincoln's sound 
strategic ideas as I have pointed out in a previous paper.^ 

In determining his own location as commander of all the 
armies Grant's experience in the West enabled him to decide 

1 "President Lincoln as War Statesman," in Wisconsin Historical Society Proceedingg, 
1916, 106-40. 



20 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

correctly to accompany in the campaign the Army of the 
Potomac. His relationship to that army, however, was a 
more difficult problem for him and one the solution of which 
it took a month's bloody experience to teach. His experi- 
ence with the Army of the Cumberland, which he had so 
strongly and unnecessarily antagonized at Chattanooga, had 
taught him the danger of hurting the pride or prestige of 
the Army of the Potomac by removing Meade, but he did 
hurt it in other ways. His first conception of his relation- 
ship to Meade was that of a superior mentor and guide. He 
began the campaign of 1864 in Virginia with a quite proper 
directive, along parallel lines to his directive to Sherman. 
But when, during the first day of the Wilderness fight he 
saw the battle going as any woods fight has always gone and 
probably always will go, as he had seen Donelson and 
Shiloh go, he lost his balance and without justification began 
to hector and to irritate Meade, Meade's staff, and Meade's 
army, and, further, to divide with him the tactical control 
and responsibility for the battle. But that action by itself 
was not the worst phase of Grant's conduct. By mixing 
in Meade's business he was not only compromising the 
fighting power of the army he had chosen to accompany but 
was neglecting his own straight-forward military duty. 
This duty, as the military man views it today, and as Grant, 
himself, later in the campaign learned to view it, was to be 
able to tell Meade after the battle what to do next. 

It was not decisive for the war whether the battle of the 
Wilderness was lost, won, or drawn; but it was virtually 
causative of prolonging the war another year that Grant, 
instead of at once solving his own problem and being able 
to tell Meade immediately at the conclusion of the battle 
what course to pursue next, required twenty -four hours to 
disentangle his own mind and extricate his staff from inter- 
fering in Meade's affairs sufficiently to enable him to formu- 
late the next directive. 



The Military Education of Grant as General 21 

The decision itself, based on his Vicksburg lesson, was 
correct, but Grant was here opposed, not to the lumbering 
Pemberton but to the nimble-witted Lee, himself trained as 
Grant was trained by two years of practical work. The con- 
sequence of this tardiness of decision and orders was that 
Lee was able to anticipate Grant's next move on Spotsyl- 
vania and to defeat his purpose. Very different would have 
been the result had Grant been ready to give his decision 
on the evening of the second day's battle instead of the eve- 
ning following; the strategic situation of the two armies 
would then have been reversed, all in Grant's favor. 

x4ls the campaign progresses we see Grant learning his 
own proper role and doing his own proper work, leaving 
Meade and his staff to do his; and as Grant learned to do 
this he gained the power to outwit Lee, notably in the cross- 
ing of the James. But unfortunately the process of dis- 
entangling himself and his staff from the immediate control 
of the Army of the Potomac proved as costly in casualties 
and as bitter in consequences as the original intermeddling 
had been. The mixing in by Grant had led Meade and his 
subordinates to expect from him direct interference and 
positive tactical orders; consequently when Grant settled 
back after Spotsylvania and confined himseK more and more 
to his own appropriate sphere of directives, Meade was slow 
to reassume full control and made the natural error of 
continuing to interpret Grant's directives as positive orders. 
It was this error which caused the unjustifiable slaughter 
at Cold Harbor which resulted in the final weakening of 
the temper and clouding of the prestige of the Army of the 
Potomac. The immediate responsibility for it was Meade's; 
but in the ultimate the blame is Grant's for not making clear 
to Meade the change in his conception of their relationship. 
In his Memoirs Grant rightly assumes responsibility for 
the failure and the losses. 

Here then at Cold Harbor stands a man, forty-two years 
of age, who, in as complete a course of two years and a half 



22 Colonel Arthur L. Conger 

on the conduct of military operations as was ever offered at 
a military staff college, has finally taken his last examination 
and been graduated as proficient in the conduct of a brigade, 
division, corps, army, and group of armies. 

The comparisons suggested between the empirical meth- 
ods of Grant's military education and those means whereby 
the younger officer is now taught the same vital lessons of 
tactics in the school of the line and the staff college have 
doubtless raised in the reader's mind at least two questions: 
First, would a staff college graduate, had there been one, 
have been able to do with the Northern armies in 1861 what 
Grant did with them in 1864? Second, was it our staff college 
graduates who won the war with Germany for us? 

I cannot in answering these two questions give any as- 
surance that any staff' college graduate placed in McClellan's 
shoes in 1861 would necessarily have done any better than 
did McClellan; nor can I state with confidence that the staff' 
college graduate won the late war any more than the non- 
graduate. Both won it. I might, for example, name non- 
school-trained officers who rose in action brilliantly and 
deservedly, one from brigade, one from regimental com- 
mander, both to the grade of corps commander, and who 
needed no mentors as to how to exercise command. I might 
also cite as examples three staff college graduates who rose 
from the grade of colonel to command divisions and who 
would have gone farther had the war lasted longer. But, 
in the usual case, the graduate of the staff college had not 
enough rank at the outset to become a general and was there- 
fore put on the general staff and assigned to some general 
either as chief of staff' or in some other capacity. Then the 
result depended on how the two worked together and on the 
actual thoroughness with which the staff college man had 
mastered his lessons. Many generals who had such gradu- 
ates as chiefs of staff, but who failed to learn how to make 
use of them, also failed to make progress in action and were 



The Military Education of Grant as General 23 

weeded out ruthlessly by those higher up, who demanded 
constant success. Other generals having graduates as chiefs 
of staff leaned on them too confidently, only to find them 
broken reeds, and in such cases both the general and the 
chief of staff were often, to use the soldier phrase, "canned" 
at the same time. 

The enviable professional opportunities afforded the 
lower-ranking staff graduate, when assigned to a general who 
could appreciate his ability, may be illustrated by the half 
joking, half serious remarks exchanged one evening between 
two generals of high rank. They were dining together in 
France shortly before the armistice with only their respec- 
tive chiefs of staff present. 

"I wonder," said the older general to the younger, "if 
you have one of those chiefs of staff, like mine, who tells you 
everything to do, where to go, and what to say." 

"Yes, I have," replied the other, "I never did anything 
he did not tell me to do but once, and I never cease to shud- 
der over the muddle I got into that time!" 

In the case of those two generals and in that of many 
others success and fame came to them through finding a 
staff college graduate who had mastered his art and was not 
only willing but eager to grasp the opportunity to practice 
it, perfectly content that his general should get the popular 
credit for it and anxious only that the work should be well 
done. The real people, he was aware, those on the inside, 
knew who was doing the work, who was really responsible, 
and the others did not matter. 

This resulted in a situation somewhat akin to that which 
existed in the former German army in which princes and 
kings were titular heads of corps and armies, while highly 
trained, trusted, and tried staff officers did their work. The 
German Crown Prince in 1870, for example, though nom- 
inally an army commander, was in reality a mere puppet in 
the hands of his chief of staff, and the Crown Prince in the 



24 Colo7iel Arthur L. Conger 

recent war was the same. It is evident that so long as we 
continue to pursue the pohcy of regarding higher appoint- 
ments in the army as rewards to be given for poUtical serv- 
ices rendered, such a system is not only inevitable but de- 
sirable for us also. The system has its drawbacks, however, 
for if some high-ranking general gets a young and conceited 
general staff chief who does not really know very much but 
who thinks that he does it makes for trouble all the way up 
and down the line. 

There was plenty of friction from such causes in our army 
in France. Of our staff college men serving in staff posi- 
tions, from the highest down to the division, the lowest unit 
which has a general staff, we may say that some made "ex- 
cellent," some merely "good," some only "fair." Other 
staff college men failed utterly, both as staff officers and as 
commanders. In such cases it was not a failure of knowl- 
edge so much as of character; they simply had not the requi- 
site stamina. 

In other words there is no more assurance that any par- 
ticular officer passed through the staff college will come out a 
competent military leader than there is that anyone who 
passed through Grant's experiences in 1861-62 would de- 
velop the talent to conduct successfully a Vicksburg cam- 
paign in 1863. But tactics is to be learned, just as arith- 
metic, by doing many examples and solving many problems. 
Fortunate is the man who has the opportunity to learn his 
tactical lessons in the staff school, at the expense only of the 
sweat of his own brow, the rebukes of his instructors, and 
the anguish only of his own mind over his tactical sins and 
shortcomings as one after another they are discovered and 
held up in garish light for correction. And if happy is the 
man who can thus learn, still more fortunate is the govern- 
ment and country where proved, competent staff college 
graduates are plentiful and where they, and not the court 
favorites, are put in positions of high military responsibility. 



The Military Education of Grant as General 25 

What it cost to educate and graduate Grant in his prac- 
tical course in mihtary art, in hves, money, and resources I 
leave it to others to calculate if they choose. For myself 
the important fact is that he was finally educated and able 
to end the war the right way for the people of the United 
States. What it now seems increasingly important for the 
people of this country to understand, as we become more 
enmeshed in world politics, is that Grant, Napoleon, Caesar, 
and most others popularly regarded as inspired military 
geniuses were not geniuses at all, in the popular sense, but 
simply human beings trained and finally graduated either 
in the school of hard, actual experience or in a professional 
school presided over by a Moltke, a Foch, a Douglas Haig, 
or a Morrison. 

Our people need also to realize that in a modern war, 
against a nation fighting under leaders already trained when 
war begins, we cannot hope to win if we plan for the educa- 
tion of the military leader in our next war to take the time, 
expenditure of money, and wastage of lives, necessary to 
educate Grant. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

This study makes no pretense at being a history of 
Grant's military career; it is intended merely to serve as a 
partial interpretation of that career along tactical lines. 
The sources for it are chiefly the Official Records of the War 
of the Rebellion. The biographies of Grant by Badeau, 
Coppee, King, and others all assume that that attack or de- 
fense which succeeded was therefore correct; they are, in 
other words, not written on a critical tactical basis. Grant's 
Campaign in 186 J^, by Major C. F. Atkinson of the British 
Army, and Colonel Willey Howell's study of the same cam- 
paign, in volume one of the Military Historian and Econ- 
omist, constitute valuable introductions to a military analy- 
sis of that campaign. In the latter volume will be found a 
study by myself of Fort Donelson. For the remainder, after 



26 



013 789 319 8 • 

Colonel Arthur L. Conger 



employing the Scribner series on the Civil War for orienta- 
tion purposes it is recommended that one go direct to the 
Official Records which richly repay investigation by the 
student of military history. Grant's earlier career, before 
Belmont, not touched on here, is especially interesting. The 
chief sources for it will be found in the Official Records, War 
of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. Ill, pp. 130 and 430-48 for 
the Ironton command, and pp. 452-05 for the Jefferson 
City command, and p. 141 et seq. for the Cairo command. 
See also Correspondence in Series II, Vol. I. These earlier 
reports and correspondence suffice to give a distinct, char- 
acteristic, and most agreeable picture of Grant's good quali- 
fications, his simplicity, directness, and common sense. 
Until Be'mont he had not learned caution in deahng with 
superiors and associates and wrote as he thought. For the 
Belmont reports see Official Records, Series I, Vol. Ill, pp. 
266-364. For the other campaigns and battles reference 
to the General Index of the Rebellion Records (Serial num- 
ber 130) is recommended. 

Grant's Memoirs, written late in life, are psychologically 
interesting but not militarily instructive. Grant's military 
knowledge, like a foreign language learned late in life, ap- 
parently fell away from him with disuse. He forgot what he 
had done and why he did it. His own course he quite hu- 
manly sought to justify and his own role and importance 
quite as humanly to magnify, naively oblivious of the exis- 
tence of either tendency in himself. Because of lack of crit- 
ical aid in the preparation of his Memoirs they contain fre- 
quent errors of fact as well as of interpretation. 



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